


Swatches

by StairwellWit



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Gratuitous use of run on sentences, He just wants to love and be loved, I haven't decided if there will be any actual romantic goal to this, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Marcus Keane has many loves through his life, Most of these things are just mentioned, Non-Linear Narrative, References to Depression, Unreliable Narrator, You can have many soul mates, first and second season, no graphic descriptions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 15:59:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15028124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StairwellWit/pseuds/StairwellWit
Summary: Swatches of Marcus Keane's life and the people who thread them all together.





	Swatches

**Author's Note:**

> Hi hello! This is a piece I've decided to post as a sort of a pilot test.  
> There are a few chapters to it, all spanning across Marcus Keane's life and different people who have come in and out of it.  
> I haven't posted anything online in a very long time because at some point I lost all self esteem related to writing and art. But I hope that if this is well received I can make a progressive consistent return.  
> Definitely give feed back! I love to hear from readers!
> 
> Not beta-read, all mistakes are my own.

Marcus Keane is eight when he meets the boy in the oak tree. The other orphans are throwing bricks at him until Marcus fights them off. He gets a broken nose for his trouble, hardly the first or the last he will ever receive; but the children leave and the boy in the tree is eventually coaxed to climb down. This close Marcus can see the boy has silvery scars all along his arms and he does not understand this yet. But they remind him of filigree. When he tells the boy they are beautiful, the boy cries.

* * *

  
Months later they are inseparable and often the boy appears with fresh bandages on his arm. Marcus does not ask. Because Marcus is still close enough to his father's ghost that he knows how not to see things in front of his face. How not to comment on blood under sleeves. He thinks perhaps it makes the boy happier to forget, thinks he sees something like happiness in the corners of his eyes, like rheum caught but fragile and ready to be rubbed away. He would rather not be what shakes it free. So he never asks, he lets it be.  
The day comes and there are no bandages, only pinkish lines healing from weeks before. They are under what has become their tree when the boy says, “The further you go in one direction you're just walking closer in the other.” He says this matter of factly, watching bees skirt the lake of grass in front of them and Marcus can hardly disagree. Too pleased to bother even if he could, they have stolen honey comb from the priests' kitchen. It is sticky, and golden, and warm.  
Marcus thinks maybe this is what God's love feels like.

* * *

  
Before the boy, suicide is not a word he truly understands. For Marcus is still young, and after his father, he wants little more to do with the concept of death than he already created firsthand. Suicide is just a word. Three syllables he knows in vague shape but does not truly decipher until years after he comes to the Church orphanage. He does not understand until the shape is no longer blurred by childish misunderstanding, but is brought to solidity in a single clotted ravine in the boys arm.  
This is not filigree. Delicate or divine. This is not beautiful.  
This is a rusted padlock, forced open, splayed and corroding. This is breaking and entering.  
The boy is dead, and this is a shame. With that much of what the priests say he will agree. It is a shame. But if there is sin here, it is not one of the boy's.

* * *

 

  
The day before the boy is turning gray and rigid on a slab in the belly of the church basement the two of them grin and laugh. He hadn't any new scars for months, Marcus checked, his chest swelling with pride each time. The two of them rolled in the grass, wrestled like children. Because though this goes forgotten, children is what they are. The sun had been too bright and Marcus spent the day with spots in his vision from the blinding glare overhead. The sparks gathered and created a crown around the boys hair but he had been too happy to want to compare them to thorns, to think of anything cutting or bloody. Not when he could hold the boy's hands, kiss his knuckles, touch his cheek. Reach and reach, because Marcus' hands would always be his downfall.  
This was something he'd always known well. Long before he knows much else. Marcus knows that he is weak and he wants. Lord, how he _wants_. Wants to touch everything beautiful in God's creation, and what is the boy if not beautiful and from God?  
His mother had told him his greedy hands would get him into trouble, grabbing first, listening later. But the boy is warm, and golden, a little like honey, a little more like love; and beneath their tree and God's eyes Marcus would admit he could never be above this particular brand of selfishness.  
This is the day before and Marcus had traced the lines on his arms and almost believed, the heart beneath his ear beating a steady rhythm, that he could be happy there on out. The worst of his life had passed, his trial had been had. The moment in the tall grass, long piano fingers carding his hair, calloused palms and hands made for lovelier things than self harm, he thought this could be.  
The sun was broken through the leaves of their tree when the boy's voice had vibrated under him, tickling his inner ear as he dozed.  
“The further you get in one direction, you're just walking closer in the other, Marcus. Don't forget, do you hear? Va bene?” Marcus had said okay, _va bene_ , given the boy a soft smile and dozed again. In hindsight he will think, he does think, he should have seen what he meant. Should have seen it coming. He will blame himself for a long time, if not forever. Deep down Marcus knows he could not have understood.  
Youth, even a violent one, yields hopefulness.  
Instead of understanding, of knowing something he could not have known, Marcus had looked up and almost kissed him then. Through the crown of sparks, between the gusts of wind. Then he had changed his mind at the very last second, thinking to himself, there would be time. So, so, much time.  
  
(marcus learns very young there is very little difference between the blink of an eye and an eternity and most important things happen somewhere in between)  
  
The next day the boy is dead and this is the first and last time he kisses him. He is cold, and firm, and tastes of salt and myrrh. Marcus will regret very few things in life like he regrets this.

* * *

 

  
When Marcus is arranged to another orphanage he buries a jar of honey comb under their tree with the boy's unmarked grave. Suicide is a sin and with this sin he was not to be buried in the church plots. Marcus thinks the boy would have preferred it this way anyhow. God's attention is undivided here.  
Under the tree, over the grave, he says a prayer  
“My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste: So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul; when thou hast found it, then there shall be a reward..”  
Honey does not rot, and he tells the boy, and the land, the tree and God, neither shall his love.

* * *

 

  
A handful of years after this Marcus has seen the face of God. Heard his voice, felt his hand. He looks demons in the eyes because nothing will ever be as terrifying as God was encompassing. The church officials, they call him a golden child. He wants to tell them there is very little golden in the face of Hell searing through a child's face. Marcus knows their look, knows their faces, contorted with savagery and hatred, possession. These are innocents with luciferian hands tearing themselves and anything around them. He will hold them regardless, clean their souls and lead them home. He does not tell anyone that when it's all over he vomits into motel toilets and petrol station lots, mostly because they warned him he would. Call it job hazard, they said. Situational acclimation. You get used to it after a while.  
So when he is 19 and he carves a pattern he remembers from the boy's arm into his own. No one is really surprised. But why he does this isn't for the reasons they tell him. It isn't because he's depressed. (Even though he maybe, probably, definitely is.) This isn't depression so much as battle formation. There is a girl new in his mind, on her floor, in her blood with a note that says she just 'couldn't no more'. This is because these few years in Marcus thinks, how can he truly help people fight back from a place he has never fought himself. It is the boy in the tree thinking a cut was a cure and who is Marcus to tell him, or anyone after, otherwise. Who is he to say it is not.  
His own scar heals without grace or beauty. It is knotted and raised. He thinks of eyes in trees. Lead between stained glass panes. This is a reminder that his boy made a choice when he felt he had no other to make. That there will be others who will feel the same and he wants to know what to say.  
And maybe, probably, definitely, Marcus wants to know how close a cut or a jump or a noose will get.

 


End file.
